Charles Glass: Four more years - how many more wars?

The Independent

05 September 2004

Buoyed by the triumphalist Republican convention that nominated him for
re-election last week, President George Bush is looking for the real electoral
mandate that eluded him four years ago. Watch out. If he wins legitimately in
November, rather than by virtue of dubious Florida ballots and Supreme Court
fiat, he and his entourage of businessmen-warrior-politicians will claim public
endorsement for invading countries that have not attacked the United States,
rescinding treaties that protected the world from nuclear and environmental
holocausts, granting billion-dollar government contracts without competitive
bidding to firms in which administration officials have vested interests,
expanding a global prison system in which detainees are held without trial or
access to legal counsel, dismantling the social security pensions system,
eroding what few protections workers have from industrial accidents and taking
exclusive possession of space for the US military to engage in what the USAF
Space Command calls "instant engagement anywhere in the world".

If you
thought the past four years were tricky, you ain't seen nothin' yet. With the
approval of the nation's voters, George Bush will be free to move to the next
phase of the preventive war doctrine that he justified on Thursday in Madison
Square Garden: "Do I forget the lessons of September 11th, and take the word of
a madman, or do I take action to defend our country? Faced with that choice, I
will defend America every time." Every time? Bush can face that choice every
day - or, at least, every day he chooses to. There is almost no country or
organisation on Earth that cannot threaten the US. Most states have stores of
chemical and biological weapons, and all can pay dedicated fanatics to
hand-carry them to New York. Quite a few have nuclear weapons, and more are
trying to get them to stave off US threats and attacks. Public backing for Bush
gives him licence under his stated doctrine of preventive war, itself a dubious
concept condemned in international law and at the Nuremberg trials, to attack
anyone he chooses - Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Sierra Leone or France.

Bush
is, after all, the self-declared "war president" in a war against terror that he
admits may never end and may never be won. It is like the war on drugs and just
as useful for locking people up. Perpetual war? With all that that entails for
the countries bombed and the people taken from their homes to Guantanamo, Diego
Garcia, Bagram air base or any of the hundreds of CIA secret interrogation
houses around the world? With all that means for the US economy, which will pay
for it by cutting help to the poorest?

In 2000, most of those who voted
for George Bush did not do so in order to invade Iraq, to turn the US armed
forces into a hated army of occupation, to commit torture and other war crimes,
to invite terrorist responses to US violence overseas, to impose a puppet
government on Afghanistan and to seek the overthrow of the elected president of
Venezuela. They did not know Bush would give them a war to deliver billions to
Dick Cheney's Halliburton and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's old
firm, CACI, to help out as private contractors torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib
in Baghdad. They could not have anticipated a return to the evils of the
Vietnam years - the assassination programmes, the torture centres, the
destruction of homes and villages harbouring suspected "terrorists" - in which
many of Bush's colleagues participated while serving President Nixon. Now, they
know that America is "imposing democracy" on the Arabs and making America
"safer". Americans voting for Bush this time are choosing more war. The media
have not exposed the meaning of Bush's policies, preferring to increase public
fear to attract viewers and justify the limitation on dissent. With their
embedded journalists and tales of military bravado, they encourage America to
imagine itself as more noble in battle than in peace. Indeed, for Bush and the
media magnates he has enriched there is no peace agenda. There is no programme
to relieve poverty, provide medical care and protect the environment. All that
is for wimps. We're warriors now.

"The only version of national pride
encouraged by American popular culture," the American philosopher Richard Rorty
has written, "is simple-minded military chauvinism." Gone are the Walt Whitmans
and John Deweys, of whom Rorty says, "They wanted the struggle for social
justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul." There
would be no airtime for Whitman today amid the "experts" pontificating on
terror.

If the Democrats offer an alternative vision, they are not making
it clear what it is. It was a Democratic secretary of state, Madeleine
Albright, who told The New Republic in 1998, "If we have to use force, it is
because we are America. We are the indispensable nation." Kerry voted for
Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he has not promised to dismantle Bush's
illegal world prisons. Without drawing a clear line between himself and Bush,
he is doomed to defeat. Samuel I Rosenman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speech
writer, recalls in his memoir Working with Roosevelt a declaration Roosevelt
wrote himself to deliver to the Democratic Convention in 1940 if its delegates
rejected his vice-presidential choice, the progressive agriculture secretary
Henry Wallace. "In this century in which we live, the Democratic Party has
received the support of the electorate only when the party, with absolute
clarity, has been the champion of progressive and liberal principles of
government... The party has failed consist ently when through political trading
and chicanery it has fallen into the control of those interests, personal and
financial, which think in terms of dollars instead of in terms of human values."
The party selected Wallace, and Roosevelt won another landslide as a
progressive.

John Kerry offers Americans no reason to choose him instead
of Bush. He says he would be a war leader who had fought a war. He does not
say he would curb corporate monopolies. He does not say he will interfere with
the corporate agribusinesses that are replacing America's farmers. He does not
say Americans will no longer go broke paying their doctors' bills. For Kerry,
it may be too late to abandon the financiers who have funded his campaign and
embrace the people whose hopes their money is destroying.